Category: Sandbox

Title VI Fix Passes in House

On By Martin Kramer

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the International Studies in Higher Education Act (H.R. 3077)—the Title VI fix that will establish an advisory board for the federal program that subsidizes Middle Eastern (and other area) studies in American universities. The bill, having won overwhelming bipartisan support in the House, now goes to the Senate. Sandstorm has already underlined the bill’s importance, and I know that many readers wrote to its author, Representative Peter Hoekstra (R-Michigan) in support of it. But the road is still long.

The higher education lobby, led by the American Council on Education (ACE), remains determined to gut the bill. Never mind that the board will be advisory, not supervisory. Never mind that the bill doesn’t allow the board “to mandate, direct, or control an institution of higher education’s specific instructional content, curriculum, or program of instruction.” ACE just doesn’t like the idea of anyone in Washington watching what academics do, even with tax dollars. Here is ACE’s latest, in a letter issued on the day the bill sailed through the House:

We believe the current legislation leaves open the possibility that the Advisory Board could intrude into the academic conduct and content of higher education and could impinge on institutional decisions about curriculum and activities. Indeed, the powers vested in the proposed Advisory Board make it more of an investigative, rather than an advisory, body.

This is so bald a misconstrual of the bill that I dare to call it a lie. The board has no formal investigative powers. It cannot subpoena witnesses or hold anyone in contempt. Only government departments and agencies are obliged by law to provide information to the board, presumably so that it can determine whether the program is meeting the manpower needs of any agency of government. (My guess: it isn’t.) The law would enjoin the board to “monitor” the activities of Title VI. That’s an essential function: how else is the board to make intelligent recommendations? There is also a provision for public hearings, so that the many stakeholders and constituencies can make their voices heard. The board can also commission research on Title VI—something the Department of Education has done every decade anyway. But the board has no investigative “powers” at its disposal.

What ACE really wants Congress to do is to put out the eyes and cut off the ears of the board before its birth, so that it will have to rely on the demonstrably misleading “testimony” offered up by the lobby. And so ACE tries to scare up the ghost of McCarthyism by calling the board “investigative.” It’s a cheap trick, and it won’t work: the legislators are a lot smarter than most professors and their lobbyists seem to think.

I was delighted to see a liberal Democrat and civil libertarian rise on the House floor to endorse the idea of the board. Representative Howard L. Berman of California, a man wise in the ways of foreign affairs, who has been described as a “libertarian-leaning liberal,” put his finger on the problem. It’s this: as it stands, taxpayers are being ripped off by university programs that serve no national interest. Academic scammers are the problem; the board is the solution. This Sandstorm entry concludes with Representative Berman’s remarks:

I am encouraged that the creation of this Advisory Board will help redress a problem which is a great concern of mine, namely, the lack of balance, and indeed the anti-American bias that pervades Title VI- funded Middle East studies programs in particular. To the extent that it advances the national interest to commit taxpayer funds to institutions of higher education for the purpose of fostering expertise with regard to key regions of the world—and I would emphatically affirm that it does—then surely it is troubling when evidence suggests that many of the Middle East regional studies grantees are committed to a narrow point of view at odds with our national interest, a point of view that questions the validity of advancing American ideals of democracy and the rule of law around the world, and in the Middle East in particular.

The Advisory Board’s oversight function does not impinge on the academic freedom that is and must be enjoyed by our institutions of higher education. In establishing the board, we are doing no more than exercising our responsibility to ensure that the Federal funds we authorize and appropriate are expended properly.

Give Representative Berman a slap on the back. His email is Howard.Berman@mail.house.gov

MESA Footnote. Amy Newhall, executive director of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), spreads the lie, calling the advisory board an “investigative body rather than an advisory group.” And if that doesn’t stir the sleeping dogs of academe, she has another whopper: the bill “will establish a precedent for future legislation directed at any field, discipline, or professional school in any and all universities.”

Hardly. There aren’t too many disciplines that so vigorously suck the taxpayer’s teat as Middle Eastern studies, and it would be hard to find another field as intolerant of intellectual diversity. It’s the combination that is both unique and insufferable.

When the MESA mandarins huddle in Anchorage, Alaska, in their annual meeting next week, they would do well to ponder how their unchecked excesses finally prodded Washington into action. They made it easy. And if they really fear “investigation,” here is free advice from the Sandstorm advisory board: Get off the federal dole. Float undisturbed in your post-orientalist bubble while more practical people use the resources to build credible alternatives.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Title VI will cost taxpayers more than half a billion dollars over the next five years. It’s possible to work miracles with that much money. The task of the advisory board will be to make sure they happen.

Dershowitz vs. Finkelstein: My (Proper) Footnote

On By Martin Kramer

Over the last month, Alan Dershowitz and Norman Finkelstein have been going at one another over Finkelstein’s charge that Dershowitz plagiarized passages of his book, The Case for Israel. I’ll spare my readers the details. Israelis and Palestinians lurch from crisis to crisis, while two professors debate the finer points of the Chicago Manual of Style. I find it difficult to take the whole business seriously, but if you do want to track the controversy, here is a link that will take you to Finkelstein’s charges, subsequently amplified by Alexander Cockburn; Dershowitz’s rejoinder; Finkelstein again; Dershowitz again….

So why even mention it here? The controversy provides me with a perfect opportunity to post my review of the book that Dershowitz allegedly plagiarized: From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, by Joan Peters. I wrote the review more than nineteen years ago, when I was young and obscure, and it appeared in a journal that isn’t exactly a must-read: The New Leader. I have no recollection of why I agreed to review the book, but I did, and in retrospect I managed to identify both its strong points and its weaknesses. Finkelstein, with his taste for hyperbole, has called the book a hoax, which it wasn’t. It raised an important question about Palestinian demography, but it did so in ways that left it vulnerable to attacks by serious people. Nevertheless, other serious people have substantiated aspects of her argument, at least for certain periods.

These days, the demographic argument is not so much about what was but what will be. Until Sandstorm approaches it, content yourself with my resurrected review of From Time Immemorial.

Title VI in Congress: Not on Our Dime

On By Martin Kramer

Back in June, the House Subcommittee on Select Education convened hearings on bias in Title VI, the program of government subsidies for area studies in universities. The indefatigable Stanley Kurtz, critic of Title VI, gave invaluable testimony and carried the day. Kurtz, Daniel Pipes, and I also urged readers to write to subcommittee chair Peter Hoekstra (R-Michigan), asking him to introduce legislation establishing a board for Title VI. Representative Hoekstra has done just that.

Hoekstra is the author of the International Studies in Higher Education Act (H.R. 3077). On September 17, the subcommittee passed it unanimously. On September 25, the full Committee on Education and the Workforce reported it favorably by unanimous voice vote. (Kurtz and I attended that markup.) It now goes to the House floor. The bill is a compromise—American politics, unlike the “dictatorship of virtue” that prevails in academe, involves compromise—but the result is a genuine breakthrough. (To read the bill, click here and enter “HR3077” for the bill number. The relevant version is the second one, reported in the House.)

The bill does three things. First, it recalls the original purpose of the Title VI program: to enhance the “national interests” and meet the “national needs” of the United States. Title VI began as a national defense program in 1958. In later years, it became a semi-entitlement, lightly administered by the Department of Education. Ultimately it became part of the reproductive tract of academic area studies—slush for arcane research by grad students bent on academic careers. The bill emphasizes, in its “findings and purposes,” that the country’s post-9/11 security requires trained Americans who are “willing to serve their nation,” and charges Title VI with “assist[ing] the national effort to educate and train citizens to participate in the efforts of homeland security.” The bill also requires grantee institutions to allow unencumbered government recruiting.

Just the other week, a report on U.S. public diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim world gave distressing figures on the lack of Arabic competence in the State Department. Reports underline an identical problem in the ranks of U.S. administrators in Iraq. There are lots of reasons for the shortfall, but one of them is that universities use Title VI money to produce more academics—and nothing else. The bill sends a strong message: in future, programs also will be judged by the degree to which they send students into the nation’s service.

Second, the bill establishes that academic programs supported by Title VI, including outreach programs, should “reflect diverse perspectives and represent the full range of views” on international affairs. Activities under Title VI should “foster debate on American foreign policy from diverse perspectives.” When the Coalition for International Education, one of the higher education lobbies, saw this wording, it assured members it was lobbying toward “eliminating language about diverse perspectives, debate and range of views.” Diversity is one of the great mantras of academe—provided the diversity isn’t intellectual.

Fortunately, the legislators were wiser. They know that academe, which preserves its ancient structure as a guild, places a premium on conformity. The language on diversity and full range has remained, so that the bill effectively enjoins academe to make room for alternative views. This is particularly crucial in outreach beyond the campus, an activity mandated by Title VI, in which the instances of one-sided propagandizing are legion.

Third, and most important, the bill establishes a seven-member advisory board, completely independent of any department or agency, and empowered “to study, monitor, apprise, and evaluate” activities supported under the title. Three of the board members are to be appointed by the Secretary of Education, and two of those will represent government agencies with national security responsibilities. The leaders of the House of Representatives and the Senate each will appoint two more. The board will meet once a year, to make recommendations to the Department of Education and the Congress on the operation of Title VI. Before making recommendations, the board will hold public hearings.

The board is not exactly revolutionary. Boards govern the Fulbright program, another major source of fellowships; the National Security Education Program, a program of scholarships; and the U.S. Institute of Peace, which makes grants to academics. Even Title VI once had a board, a few decades back. But for a long time, Title VI has enjoyed a general exemption from any outside input, and has been run by and for the academic mandarins. The new board will give the rest of us—government agencies, the Congress, and the interested public—an instrument to monitor Title VI and influence the policies that guide it. That lays a new foundation for a partnership among academe, government, and the public, at a time of pressing national need.

But because the bill does all these things, the lights are burning late over at the American Council on Education (ACE), higher education’s top lobby. Even though the bill has been amended to meet many of their concerns, they won’t rest until the board is bound, gagged, and blindfolded. To some extent, the board is already bound: it’s an advisory board, not a supervisory one, and it can only make recommendations. To a lesser extent, it is gagged: it cannot recommend legislation without the approval of the President. So far, it hasn’t been blindfolded. So the folks over at ACE are still at work. Read their latest:

The higher education community still is fearful that this board, rather than being just an advisory body, would have too much authority to interfere in the curricular activities of individual institutions and might set a precedent for further federal involvement in the conduct and content of higher education. The American Council on Education will continue to seek further improvements to the bill as it moves to the House floor for consideration.

In fact, far from having “too much authority,” the board has too little. Read the bill. The board only has the power to make recommendations. The Secretary of Education isn’t obliged to accept any of them. And the lobby has already succeeded in getting this passage inserted in the bill: “Nothing in this title shall be construed to authorize the board to mandate, direct, or control an institution of higher education’s specific instructional content, curriculum, or program of instruction.” So just what does the education lobby want?

It wants a board that will do absolutely nothing. And to achieve that end, no scare tactics are too crude. Listen, for example, to Gilbert W. Merkx, a Duke professor (who also testified last June): “The advisory board could easily be hijacked by those who have a political ax to grind and become a vehicle for an inquisition.” That’s the mindset of the mandarins: people with different views are ax-wielding hijackers, and any criticism is an “inquisition.”

I have a word of advice to Professor Merkx and other academics who fear that government might peek into the principalities over which they rule: Don’t take taxpayers’ money. There are plenty of university programs in international and area studies that don’t get Title VI funding. Become one of them. Get off the public dole and find other subsidies—perhaps from one of those rich Saudi princes on an academic shopping spree. Then you can run your program without any diversity of perspectives, just like they do in Saudi Arabia. You won’t be missed, and other worthy recipients will benefit.

The bill now has to get past the House floor and the Senate. What can we do to keep it from being gutted by the high-powered lobbyists of big academe? Easy: write to Washington. Tell elected representatives that you support the International Studies in Higher Education Act (H.R. 3077), that you support a strong and effective advisory board for Title VI, and that you believe that Title VI programs should reflect diverse perspectives and represent a full range of views. Send your letter to:

  • Representative Peter Hoekstra (R-Michigan) at tellhoek@mail.house.gov. As author of the bill, he needs to hear that there is a constituency that opposes any erosion of the board’s advisory powers. That’s important to move the bill unscathed through the House.
  • Senator Judd Gregg (R-New Hampshire), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, at mailbox@gregg.senate.gov. His committee is the next stop, once the bill clears the House.

It also helps to send copies of your letter to your own congressman and senators.

If you’re a student, and you’ve been galvanized by 9/11 to study foreign affairs, you have a special interest in this bill. It will open intellectual space and expand your opportunities. You have a greater stake in this legislation than your professors, who already enjoy the security and privileges of tenure. Write in support of the bill in your campus newspaper, and e-mail the article or letter to Representative Hoekstra and Senator Gregg. When an editorial in the Daily Texan, the student newspaper of the University of Texas at Austin, endorsed the bill, a congressman from Texas signed on as a cosponsor. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce even reproduced the editorial in its appeal for more cosponsors. Students are voters, and they matter as much to legislators as professors. (Indeed, they might matter even more, since there are more of them.) Use your leverage.

It’s time to write a new contract for Title VI—not to punish anyone, but to deepen America’s resources for coping with the world. A contract has at least two parties. To all those lobbyists and academics who think Title VI is an entitlement, encourage Congress to send this message: “Not on our dime.”

Pointers: Stanley Kurtz joins me this very day with a column on the subject. And Dr. Robert Satloff sends a letter to Representative Hoesktra that serves as a perfect model.